Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedDavid Rosenthal: belief
26 Aug 2025 Acquired Google Part II: Alphabet
“Friendster was a thing at the time, January, 2004, before Gmail, before the Google IPO, before Facebook launches on the Harvard campus, in his 20% time, he launches a social network within Google called Orkut. It didn’t become that big in America, but it got at its peak, I think 300 million users.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- David Rosenthal
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 26 Aug 2025
- Publisher
- Acquired
- Episode
- Google Part II: Alphabet
Transcript context
…Yeah, that’s true. Which I think was like a 20% time project then blew up in Brazil. Totally. There was a Turkish engineer who worked for Google named Orkut Büyükkökten, and his passion was social networking. Friendster was a thing at the time, January, 2004, before Gmail, before the Google IPO, before Facebook launches on the Harvard campus, in his 20% time, he launches a social network within Google called Orkut. It didn’t become that big in America, but it got at its peak, I think 300 million users. It was the biggest social network in Brazil, the biggest social network in India. Google was like, eh, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem that important. Open Social Event in 2007, Google Wave in 2009. By the way, can we just pause and say 2009, this is like right after Chrome, right after Android. Google is a big place and Google is a siloed place at this point. It's crazy that Android is happening over in this other building and there’s this fight with Apple and that’s the same time that they’re doing Google Wave. It’s weird that this is all concurrent. The company was focused in a lot of different directions.…
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